Inria Chile continues its development in South America. In recent years, with Claude Puech at the helm, she has strengthened her network of contacts and has set up partnerships with investment structures to accelerate the creation of strategies in Chile. Appointed on September 1st as Director, Nayat Sanchez Pi intends to pursue this strategy and implement an ambitious settlement project that includes opening to French partners, the revitalization of the transfer policy and the establishment of a sustainable economic model.

Thirty years ago, the Web was set up to meet an ever-growing need to organise and access information. As a founding member for Europe of the W3C, Inria take a look back at the birth of the Web as both a research subject and a tool, assessing the problems that continue to be raised.

Capitalizing on five years of research-collaboration success, Mitacs and Inria renewed their partnership originally signed in 2014. The memorandum of understanding (MOU) supports two-way international research opportunities for graduate researchers at Canadian universities and at eight Inria Research Centres in France.

The CNIL (French Data Protection Authority) and Inria have awarded the 2017 "privacy protection" Prize to a European research team. During the 11th international conference Computers Privacy and Data Protection
(CPDP) to Seda GÜRSES, Carmela TRONCOSO and Claudia DIAZ for their article « Engineering privacy by design reloaded
».

The CCSD (Centre for Direct Scientific Communication) and Software Heritage have announced their collaboration beginning early 2018: it will enable the data repository in HAL to be extended to software and, as a result, contribute to the recognition of the work of research software developers.

Facebook is investing an additional 10 million Euros and doubling the Facebook AI Research (FAIR) team in order to accelerate research on artificial intelligence in France. As a result, Facebook's European hub is strengthening its partnership with Inria.

Facebook is investing an additional 10 million Euros and doubling the Facebook AI Research (FAIR) team in order to accelerate research on artificial intelligence in France. As a result, Facebook's European hub is strengthening its partnership with Inria.

InriaSoft aims for the durable development of large-scale software programs by bringing together their user communities within consortia that will finance a team of engineers tasked with their maintenance and evolution. The InriaSoft headquarters are based in Rennes, as Claude Labit, director, and David Margery, technical director of this national action backed by the Fondation Inria, explain.

Team presentation

The aim of the project-team is the design and the development of tools for
checking the safety of systems with an infinite number of states. Our
analysis of systems is based on a symbolic representation of the sets of
states as formal languages or logical formulas. Safety is obtained by
automated proofs, symbolic exploration of models, or tests generation.
These validation methods are complementary. They are based, in our
project, on accessibility problems and their reduction to constraints
solving.
An originality of the project lies in its focusing on the infinite
systems, parameterized or of large size, where each technique taken
separately shows its limits. As examples of such systems we can mention
protocols operating on topologies of arbitrary size (ring networks),
systems handling datastructures with unspecified size (sets), or whose
control is infinite (automata communicating by unlimited buffers).
The applications are embedded softwares on smart cards, for example,
security protocols and distributed systems.

Research themes

Making of methods and tools for checking of critical software is our
objective. To carry it out, we develop in a joint way deduction
techniques for software safety, constraints solving techniques for tests
generation, and methods for computing reachability for the verification
of infinite systems.

Automated deduction:
The goal is to prove the validity of assertions resulting from the
analysis of the programs. We develop techniques and systems of
automated deduction based on term rewriting and constraints
solving. The verification of recursive data structures frequently
calls upon induction, equational reasoning, and exploits
properties of operators like associativity or commutativity.

Synthesis and resolution of set constraints:
The objective of this task concerns the evaluation of formal
specifications, based on logic and sets. Current work is based on
the development of a set constraints solving system around the
core system CLPS.

Analysis of reachability in infinite systems:
The principal objective of this task is to determine if unsafe
states can or cannot be reached by a system of large or infinite
size. These reachability problems are obviously fundamental to
guarantee the safety of critical systems.

The current application domains of the team are:

Verification of security protocols:
Security protocols like SET, TLS, Kerberos are designed to
establish confidence at the time of the electronic transactions.
They rely on cryptographic primitives aiming at ensuring the
integrity of data, authentication or anonymity of the
participants, confidentiality of transactions, and so on.
The experience shows that the design of these protocols is often
erroneous, even when admitting that cryptography is perfect, i.e.
when encrypted messages cannot be deciphered without the key. An
adversary can intercept, analyze and modify the messages with
small computing power and cause for example significant economic
damages.
The analysis of cryptographic protocols is complex because the set
of configurations is huge or infinite: it is necessary to take
into account any number of sessions, any size for the messages,
the interleaving of sessions, the algebraic properties of
cryptographic primitives or data structures.
Our approach consists in automating as much as possible the
protocol analysis, starting from their specifications. The system
CASRUL that we develop compiles the specifications before
submitting them to decisions procedures.

Generation of tests sequences from a formal model:
An application of our set constraints solving system is the
generation of test sequences. It relies on first extracting limit
values for states variables from a specification, and second, on
computing the sequences of operations that keep the system in
these limit states. In the two phases, the technique uses the
constraint solver.

International and industrial relations

Industrial partnerships:

Since 1997, a collaboration is ongoing with SchlumbergerSema, Test and
Transaction division, on formal specifications and test generation
from a formal model.

The ANVAR, within the frame of an innovation support procedure,
supports the development of the BZ-Testing-Tool environment, for
diffusion as free software for noncommercial use, over 2001-2003.

International relationships:

We participate to the European program: Information Society
Technologies (IST), as members of the FET Open Project Avispa (IST-2001-39252)
for 2002-5 with the ETH Zürich, the Università di Genova and Siemens Münich.
The objective of this project is to to formalize and validate a representative
corpus of Internet protocols selected in the drafts of the IETF, and to build a
powerful analyzer for protocols described by complex specifications.

We collaborate with Ralf Kuesters from the university of Kiel, within the
framework of the PAI Procope.

We collaborate with SUP'COM (High School of Communications of
Tunis), within the framework of a STIC project with A.
Bouhoula, on formal verification of telecommunication softwares.

We have a partnership on test generation with the University of
Waikato, Hamilton, in New Zealand, Professor Marc Utting (in
six-month period invited to the LIFC, from July 2001 to January
2002), with a support of the program for scientific cooperation
between France and New Zealand.

We are in the network CPCFQ, supporting research between France and Quebec,
working on the security of cryptographic protocols.

We participate to an action Cryptology of the French Ministry of Research,
concerning the verification of security protocols (VERNAM, 2001-2003),
with the university of Provence (R. Amadio and D. Lugiez) and the ENS
Cachan (H. Comon and J. Goubault-Larrecq).
We also collaborate with several universities, such as Dublin, Verona,
EPFL Lausanne, Oran, OGE Oregon, SUNY Albany, Stanford, Grenoble,
Orleans.